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Rating: 2 out of 5
Some movies just don’t need to see the light of the day. It is okay to read a script and just throw it away in the trash. There are bad movies, and then there are straight-up AWFUL movies. Replicas is an AWFUL movie. A headscratcher where your precious time has been significantly wasted. Replicas are pretty much this; take a blender and throw in the concept of bringing back the dead from Frankenstein. Next, add some robots from the ideas of i, Robot, and Ex Machina. Let’s not forget a few Surrogates that Bruce Willis made and top it off with some special effects like Minority Report. We get this very, very bad movie.
Director Jeffrey Nachmanoff and screenwriter Chad St. John gives the world a movie that could’ve been left in the dumpster and takes star Keanu Reeves away from making the John Wick films. You would think that Reeves would’ve learned after his 47 Ronin debacle. Some lessons never hold.
William Foster (Reeves) is the head scientist at the company named Bionyne. Foster’s life work is transferring human consciousness. In simpler terms, putting one’s memory on a flash drive and moving it over to something else. In the opening scene, a new dead body is rushed to the lab. Foster’s lab partner Ed (Thomas Middleditch). The excitement is high, as this might be a successful trial. With some Minority Report type displays with the brain and coping of the memory. The memory is transferred into the body of a robot or, as they call it, a synthetic form. The experiment goes horribly wrong when the consciousness sees its metal hands. With the failure of the test and the threat of being shut down, Foster heads home for a vacation with his family: his loving but skeptical wife Mona (Alice Eve), eldest daughter Sophie (Emily Alyn Lind), middle child Matt (Emjay Anthony), and youngest child Zoe (Aria Lyric Leabu). As the family leaves for their vacation on a stormy night, their car skids off the road and crashes. The car crash leads to the death of Will’s family. Out of desperation, he calls Ed to help him bring back his family as clones. The two steal clone pods from Bionyne and somehow recreate Will’s whole family.
Where does this movie go wrong?? Pretty much everywhere. A whole 1 hour and 47 mins of complete and utter mess. The whole moving a dead person’s memory from one place to another, okay, I see it. Even as it is implanted into the robot, the reaction you got was a little intense with the robot ripping itself up but acceptable. The film completely lost it when they introduced the cloning. Why not do that in the beginning? It seemed like a wasted movie unless I missed the part on human bodies aren’t right, and the government just wants robots. If that is the case, then just make robots like drones. After the fact that Will’s family is deceased, how does one man steal so much equipment from the labs? Where are the security cameras and everything else?
This leads to the very much stupidity of Will as he never really thought what was going on through. You sit in your seat and go, “You didn’t think of this and that? How didn’t you think of all of this?” One of the things that we learn is that it takes 17 days to make a clone. No big deal. What Will forgets is his whole family life. You really didn’t think no one is going to ask questions about your family missing for so long? The entire power generator scene. You steal car batteries for a makeshift power generator, but your car is the only one that doesn’t get taken from. An excellent way to clean up your tracks and the police just were like “Oh well” job is done and we got other things to do.
The whole experiment and process of bringing back the family are so laughable it’s not even funny. Like all movies that bring back people from the dead, there are always complications. The sad part is that Ed believes he perfected his cloning process. Little does he know that like all things, problems arrive. Just erasing memories was crazy. How do you just delete a memory from someone’s mind? Finding the whole pathway thing was just laughable. Save the scientific jargon and get real with it.
Replicas is one of those movies where I would say wait for it on Netflix, but even that is a reach. While watching this movie, you might play a game, wondering what other film is the one like this. You might play a game wondering if your own consciousness can be transferred to somewhere more exciting.
